KC Confidential

Once upon a time it was magical…

It was Crown Center – the ultra upscale, urban shopping mall the mighty Hallmark Cards built. It was one of the Cowtown’s top tourist draws, ashopping Mecca. Forget about the miniature LEGOLAND Discovery Center and SEA LIFE Aquarium.

They may be kiddie magnets now – more so for visitors from Wichita and Des Moines – but in the grand scheme of things they’re small potatoes. Mere shadows of the full blown LEGOLAND Lee’s Summit tried to land a few years back. Or the real deal, twin tower aquariums that tower over the riverfront in tiny Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Seriously.

More to the point is the effect of the years of diminishing returns Hallmark has experienced in greeting card sales.  Effects likely to continue to the card company’s dying day. Effects that have rendered downtown’s once-proud, crown jewel little more than a tattered semblance of its former self.

The Crown Center of 2013 is shopworn, long in the tooth. Continue reading →

“Is there no semblance of permanence anymore?

There was a time when somebody invented something like the wheel, the lightbulb, telephone, radio, you could count upon them remaining relevant for decades, generations even.

No mas.

I remember in the early 1990s when Kansas City Star FYI editor Ellen Foley crowed about how great email was. What an amazing communications tool, Foley crowed. Let’s all start using it more and more and put an end to needless phone calls, voicemail messages, post it notes and personal encounters.

That was somewhat cutting edge thinking in 1993 when Foley ruled the features section roost. And from her lips to God’s ear the message hurtled and now who doesn’t live and die via email today?

I’ll tell you who, my twin 16 year-old daughters. Continue reading →

Et tu, Hostess?

First Monsanto, now Twinkies…the ongoing death march of prepackaged, processed foods into day-to-day lives continues.

Starting next week we’ll be getting new, improved, longer lasting Twinkies snack cakes, courtesy of a reconstituted Hostess Brands.

The investors who bought the right to make Twinkies, Hostess Cupcakes, etc. will return the snack cakes to the marketplace starting next week.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is the Twinkies “shelf life” will soar from 26 days to 45 days. Continue reading →

The jury is no longer out…

Not George Zimmerman’s murder trial, I’m talking about the pending demise of bookstores (and down the road libraries). You don’t have to drive very far to pass the fossilized remains of once booming businesses like Blockbuster Video. Drive into Lawrence on K10 for a KU basketball or (shudder) football game and you’ll pass one.

Blockbuster didn’t even have enough pride or cash left to strip the signage off its building, so it stands as a high profile reminder that DVDs and retail video rental are not long for this earth.

Kinda makes you feel sorry for what remains of the once giant corporation. Until you think back to the thousands of mom and pop video stores Blockbuster ball-busted. Continue reading →

About that Negro Leagues museum controversy Kansas City Star readers were treated to yesterday…

For starters it’s a rehash of a story that ran on Alabama.com last fall. Minus, of course, some of the positive points the proposed Birmingham Negro Leagues museum will have that KC’s Negro League’s museum doesn’t.

“What we don’t want to happen is a museum just for the sake of history,” says Chuck Faush, chief of staff to Birmingham Mayor William Bell.  “It has to be living, breathing history.”

A museum with fewer static artifacts like KC’s and “more focus on interactive technology than stagnant displays,” Fausch says. “We’re taking a 21st Century approach that historians and enthusiasts alike are going to want to be interactive. It’s going to have to be an experience.”

That’s undoubtedly one reason Kansas City’s Negro Leagues museum is worried.

And opening up a satellite branch in a former YMCA on the Paseo hardly seems a cure. Continue reading →

A tip of the hat to today’s Sunday Star…

I’ve been bagging on the Sunday newspaper a lot, citing its lack of news content. Hey, if they want to keep up – in a small town way – with the Sunday New York Times, the Star needs to at least make its filler features somewhat newsy. For example, by adding investigative pieces.

As usual today, there’s no real front page news, but at least Mike Hendricks piece about a rival Negro Leagues museum in Birmingham, Alabama and (yet) another feature milking the so-called controversy over building a billion dollar airport (that won’t cost local taxpayers a dime) had news flavorings.

That said, I’m not sure what to say about today’s third front pager, a ditty about a small town Missouri store that sells Peach Nehi Floats every summer.
Continue reading →

Thou shall not steal…

Whether tis nobler to win the hand of fair company by straightforward, above board bargaining, or merely to wheel out the local largess and leave the tab to taxpayers to be choked down a later point. Like former KC Mayor Kay Barnes did when she gave away the farm downtown and left taxpayers in the lurch at the Power & Light District and Kemper Arena.

Ever since, the mantra at the Kansas City Star has been something akin to, Don’t make ridiculous deals to lure businesses across state lines – especially from Missouri to Kansas – via sweetheart tax giveaways.

Which is pretty much what Topeka did in enticing Mars Chocolate away from the however many cities and states in what Saturday’s headline in the Star describes as “A Sweet Deal.”

Sweet indeed, but for whom? Continue reading →

B.C. Christopher

In another life I’d have been at the KCBOT that last Friday for its sad send off…

I earned my first paycheck there when I volunteered to help out over the Christmas holidays in the mailroom of my family’s firm, B.C. Christopher & Company. I was 15, pretty much a geek and $1.25 an hour was a lot of dough to me then. So much so, that when I returned the following summer, my dad refused to let me to work any overtime – even though they needed me – because he didn’t want me ranging around loose with too much money.

I graduated to the elevator department a year or two later. We leased or owned and operated about 30 country grain elevators and merchandised grain purchased directly from farmers in small towns like Mayfield, Kentucky and Gideon, Missouri. We sold it to firms that either processed the grain (like Archer, Daniels, Midland) and/or exported it (like Louis Dreyfus). Continue reading →